Learning the Language

What kind of impact have anti-bilingual-education ballot measures had in Arizona, California, and Massachusetts? The directors of the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Linguistic Minority Research Institute at UC-Santa Barbara, decided to commission research and hold a conference to explore that question.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley businessman, financed the campaigns that advocated the passage of anti-bilingual initiatives in all three states so they are nicknamed the "Unz initiatives."

I attended the conference in Sacramento, Calif., last week—hence the light posting on this blog recently—and wrote about how the researchers believe that structured English immersion hasn't proved to be any kind of magic method for teaching English to ELLs. My article, published on-line today at edweek.org, also quotes a couple of people who believe the initiatives have had a positive impact.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 12:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund came out with a report this month that calls for the No Child Left Behind Act to require a breakout of test scores according to the ethnicity of Asian students. The report also calls for the federal law to support the expansion of native-language testing. Read my colleague David Hoff's article about the report, published yesterday at edweek.org.

He notes that while the group is advocating for the federal education law to require states to collect and report more comprehensive information about Asian-Americans, it isn't recommending that schools and school districts be held accountable for the academic performance of Asian students by ethnicity. The report says services to ELLs who are Asians should be stepped up based on how well they are doing on standardized tests.

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I'm hearing a lot of talk lately about the need for teachers to be trained to work with English-language learners. Only a few states require all teachers to receive such training, so it wasn't surprising that in a recent audit by the Kansas legislature of second- and third-year teachers in that state, 60 percent of teachers who have taught ELLs in their first few years of teaching (and responded to a survey) said they didn't feel adequately prepared to do so.

The Kansas survey also found that teachers who graduated from academic programs that stress hands-on experience in creating lesson plans for ELLs during student teaching tended to feel more prepared to teach ELLs than those who didn't have such practical experience. Also, teachers said that they felt better prepared to teach those ELLs who were more proficient in English.

The 2,400 teachers surveyed had attended Kansas colleges and universities and not obtained an endorsement to teach English as a second language. The response rate of teachers was 25 percent. The audit says that some teacher-preparation programs in Kansas embed small amounts of ESL training into required methods courses. Others require specific courses focused on teaching ESL. To get an endorsement in ESL, teachers must take 15-18 college credit hours in addition to their regular coursework and pass a test on ESL content.

Florida is one of the states that requires all teachers to receive training in how to work with ELLs, and some educators have felt that too many hours of training were required for reading teachers. A bill that proposed reducing the amount of in-service hours in ESL required of reading teachers, which I wrote about last month, did not pass in the most recent session of the Florida legislature to the delight of a number of TESOL professors who opposed such a paring back of the requirement. (See "ESOL training rules may stay the same," an April 30 article in the Miami Herald.)

Food for thought: The Linguistic Minority Research Institute of the University of California has published a newsletter article by Barbara Merino spelling out "critical competencies" for teachers of English-learners (Find the Summer 2007 issue).

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Timothy Hogan, the lawyer for plaintiffs in the long-running Flores v. Arizona court case concerning ELLs, filed a motion in the U.S. District Court in Tucson last Friday, asking the federal court to stop implementation of the state's mandates for school districts to establish a new kind of program for ELLs this coming school year because the mandates aren't adequately funded, according to a May 2 Associated Press article.

Meanwhile, Tom Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction, is quoted as saying that Mr. Hogan doesn't care about ELLs because he's trying to halt implementation of the new programs in which schools must provide four hours of English-language-development instruction to ELLs each day.

I wrote an article about how the state plans to distribute $40.6 million in additional funds for ELLs, which appears in this week's Education Week. School administrators who aren't slated to receive any extra funding aren't very happy about how the money is expected to be distributed, but supporters of the distribution formula say that it's applied consistently across school districts, so they say the federal court should accept it.

For more about the four-hour programs, see my earlier post, "What's in Store for Arizona ELLs?"

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Friday's Federal Register contains a proposed "interpretation" of the No Child Left Behind Act that, if put into effect, will require states to make some big changes in their policies regarding English-language learners.

One of the biggest changes that I see is that states will have to use the same criteria for deciding when English-language learners exit from programs as they use to determine if students have attained proficiency in English for reporting purposes under accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. Now, states set criteria for what it means for students to attain proficiency in the language for NCLB purposes. But that is usually a different, typically less stringent, set of criteria than what school districts use to say children must stop getting special instruction to learn English.

The proposed interpretation permits states to use additional criteria, beyond that of students' scores on the state's English-proficiency test, to determine if students have attained proficiency in English. Those criteria might include students' performance on a state's reading or math tests. But if states decide to go that route, they would have to incorporate that additional criteria into their definitions of what it means to reach English proficiency.

In states such as California and Virginia, state education officials have left it up to administrators in school districts to decide when students should leave special programs. And it's my guess that many of these school administrators will not want to give up this discretion.

States have increasingly been moving toward standardization, but most haven't standardized their criteria to the extent that the interpretation would require.

The U.S. Department of Education is receiving comments on the proposed interpretation until June 2. Comments can be sent to LEP.Partnership@ed.gov. If you don't like something about it, this is the time to speak up.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's as clear as mud what kind of instruction schools will be giving English-language learners in Arizona in the coming school year. I didn't have much luck sorting matters out at the school district level, so I went to Tom Horne, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, for the official word on what ELL classes might look like in the fall.

A bill passed by the Arizona legislature in March 2006 requires school districts to give ELLs at lower levels of proficiency four hours of English-language-development instruction each day. Up until this school year, when a state task force further spelled out what was to happen in those four hours, the four-hour mandate was largely ignored. According to a report by the Arizona Office of Auditor General released last month, only three school districts or charter schools out of a sample of 18 had implemented the program this school year.

But Mr. Horne has said that school districts must have the four-hour programs in place by the start of next school year.

But it's still hard to predict what those programs will look like because the state task force and Mr. Horne are in the process of considering requests by school districts to carry out "alternative models."

One point of confusion has been whether the four hours of English instruction must be divorced from the teaching of academic content. The task force—and Mr. Horne in a memo called "rumor control"—clarified that "classroom materials used in an [English-language-development] class may reflect content from a variety of academic disciplines."

Could you call an ELD class "math" or "social studies?," I asked Mr. Horne during a telephone interview this week. He said, "no," that "the primary purpose has to be language development." He added that English-learners can take math class during part of the two hours of the school day not occupied with ELD instruction.

Another point of confusion is whether ELLs must be separated from other students for the full four hours.

Mr. Horne said that some school districts with very small numbers of ELLs will be exempted from the mandate to keep the students separate. In addition, he said, a school district may be exempted from the requirement to separate ELLs for four hours if it has a high rate for reclassifying students as fluent in English each year. He said he hasn't set a number for what is "high." In Arizona, school districts reclassify ELLs as fluent in English if they pass the state's English-language-proficiency test.

On average, Mr. Horne said, the reclassification rate in Arizona is 13 percent. "All I care about is getting the reclassification rate up," he said, "I think a 13 percent reclassification rate is a scandal and we have a moral duty to teach these kids English."

See earlier posts, "Critiques of Arizona's Take on Research," and "Arizona Spells Out 'Research-Based' Models for English Immersion."

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Eight in ten Muslim students surveyed in New York City say their schools are "pretty cool," according to the results of a study that Louis Cristillo, an education professor at Columbia University's Teachers College, will present at a conference hosted today by his university.

The study, "Religiousity, Education and Civic Belonging: Muslim Youth in New York City Public Schools," also showed that 17 percent of Muslim students responding to the survey said they had been the target of bigotry, often in the form of teasing or taunting about Islam, according to a Teachers College press release.

Click here for more information about the conference. It includes the launch of a book, This Is Where I Need to Be: Oral Histories of Muslim Youth in New York City, published by a Teachers College student press initiative.

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In a video that I watched this morning "Ms. Griego" models for "Ms. Sullivan" how to give English-language learners "think time" during a lesson and how to guide students to chat with a "shoulder partner," whoever is sitting next to him or her. Ms. Griego is a coach for teachers of ELLs, and Ms. Sullivan is a teacher being coached. The video doesn't name the schools where the teachers work.

The video captures excerpts of Ms. Griego's model lesson delivered to ELLs in 3rd grade, and conversations between the two teachers. It's available online from Stanford's School of Education. The coach explains, for example, why she thinks it works best to assign ELLs to work in groups of four, with students of different levels of proficiency in the same group.

The video is one of a series on teaching ELLs that have been created by professors Kenji Hakuta and Guadalupe Valdes. The one I watched was called "Modeling and Coaching SDAIE." The acronym, by the way, refers to specially designed academic instruction in English, a set of strategies used in California to teach intermediate ELLs content and language at the same time.

The video lessons seem to be well-thought-out and and correspond with three Stanford courses concerning the education of ELLs.

I learned about them through the Princeton, N.J.-based ETS, which hosted Mr. Hakuta and Ms. Valdes as panelists at a symposium about ELLs in January. You can find Power Point presentations from that meeting posted online at the conference site by clicking on the "Agenda" tab.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I found myself in the same boat as many educators a few weeks ago when I embarked on a quest to learn about Bhutanese refugees, a new wave of immigrants arriving in the United States. I had to start from scratch.

Here are a few of the basics: Bhutan is a small country wedged between India and China. It has been the home to different ethnic groups, including the refugees, who lived in Bhutan for generations and retained their Nepalese language and culture. The refugees say they were forced out of the country by discriminatory policies that made it difficult for them to legally live and work there, though the Bhutanese government says they left the country voluntarily. The Bhutanese refugees who just started to arrive in the United States have been living in refugee camps in Nepal for about 16 years. Tens of thousands are expected to arrive over the next five years.

I tell more about what I learned in "Schools Brace for Bhutanese Wave," published this week in Education Week. I found out, for instance, that I can keep track of the new groups of refugees arriving in the United States through the Cultural Orientation Resource Center of the Washington-based Center for Applied Linguistics.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Don't miss Larry Ferlazzo's compilation of "The Best Sites to Learn About U.S. Presidential Elections," which he's found to work well with English-language learners. Mr. Ferlazzo is teaching a government class this semester for intermediate ELLs at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, California.

Posted by Mary Ann Zehr at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)